The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,23

They are supposed to be beyond that.” He shook his head in disgust. He had out Mavened the Maven bible.

Alpert is not, it should be said, an obnoxious know it all. It’s easy to see how he could be, of course. Even Alpert is aware of that. “I was standing next to a kid in the supermarket who had to show his I.D. to buy cigarettes,” Alpert told me. “I was very tempted to tell him I was diagnosed with lung cancer. In a way, that desire to be of service and influence—whatever it is—can be taken too far. You can become nosy. I try to be a very passive Maven....You have to remember that it’s their decision. It’s their life.” What saves him is that you never get the sense that he’s showing off. There’s something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace. It’s not an act. It’s very similar to the social instinct of Horchow and Weisberg. At one point Alpert launched into a complicated story of how to make the best use of coupons in renting videos at Blockbuster. Then he stopped himself, as if he realized what he was saying, and burst out laughing. “Look, you can save a whole dollar! In a year’s time I could probably save enough for a whole bottle of wine.” Alpert is almost pathologically helpful. He can’t help himself. “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own,” Alpert said, which is true, although what I suspect is that the opposite is also true, that a Maven is someone who solves his own problems—his own emotional needs—by solving other people’s problems. Something in Alpert was fulfilled in knowing that I would thereafter buy a television or a car or rent a hotel room in New York armed with the knowledge he had given me.

“Mark Alpert is a wonderfully unselfish man,” Leigh MacAllister, a colleague of his at the University of Texas, told me. “I would say he saved me fifteen thousand dollars when I first came to Austin. He helped me negotiate the purchase of a house, because he understands the real estate game. I needed to get a washer and dryer. He got me a deal. I needed to get a car. I wanted to get a Volvo because I wanted to be just like Mark. Then he showed me an on line service that had the prices of Volvos all over the State of Texas and went with me to buy the car. He helped me through the maze of all the retirement plans at the University of Texas. He simplified everything. He has everything processed. That’s Mark Alpert. That’s a Market Maven. God bless him. He’s what makes the American system great.”

8.

What makes people like Mark Alpert so important in starting epidemics? Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail. Mark Alpert happens to be a connoisseur of electronic equipment. If there was a breakthrough new television or videocamera, and you were a friend of his, you can bet you would hear all about it quickly. Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word of mouth epidemics. What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.

This is surely part of the explanation for why Paul Revere’s message was so powerful on the night of his midnight ride. News of the British march did not come by fax, or by means of a group e-mail. It wasn’t broadcast on the nightly news, surrounded by commercials. It was carried by a man, a volunteer, riding on a cold night with no personal agenda other than a concern for the liberty of his peers. With Hush Puppies as well, perhaps the shoes caught the attention of Connectors precisely because they weren’t part of any self conscious, commercial fashion trend. Maybe a fashion Maven went to the East Village, looking for new ideas, and found out that you could get these really cool old Hush Puppies at a certain thrift store, for a very good price, and told his friends, who bought the shoes for themselves